Hitachi’s new CinemaStar 7mm drive offers 500GB on one platter

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SSDs are starting to invade small form-factor PCs and media devices as prices fall, but Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, now a part of Western Digital, is fighting back with a new range of 2.5-inch hard drives for the consumer electronics category. Three new CinemaStar drives have been announced to offer up cheap, quiet storage for a range of devices.

The top of the line drive is the new CinemaStar Z7K500. It combines a 7mm drive height with a 6Gb/s SATA connection, 32MB cache, and spins at 7200RPM. Even so, it manages to keep audible sound below 2.4 Bels and power use is typically 1.7W. Storage capacities available include 250GB, 320GB, and 500GB. That may not be a lot of storage space today, but it’s still impressive when you consider Hitachi is only using a single platter inside the drive.

Next is the CinemaStar Z5K500, which offers the same 7mm drive height, up to 500GB capacity and an 8MB cache, but only spins at 5400RPM. The advantage of that being it’s a quieter drive (2.0 Bels) with lower power use (1.5W), making it perfect for a DVR solution where you really don’t want any noise coming from the device.

HGST has also catered for those devices that need more storage, but can also cope with larger drive dimensions. The CinemaStar C5K1000 is a 9.5mm drive offering between 640GB and 1TB of storage with an 8MB cache and spinning at 5400RPM. It’s not as quiet as the Z5K500 or Z7K500 (2.5 Bels), but still offers up a decent solution if a 3.5-inch drive is just too big to consider.

Typically the CinemaStar range is for use in consumer electronics products, but there’s nothing to stop you sourcing one for an upgrade. For example, the C5K1000 would probably work well as a PS3 hard drive replacement.